I Feel Myself Torrent ★ Best

And now the water was coming.

My friend Lena called it a breakdown. My doctor called it "emotional dysregulation" and wrote a prescription for something that came in a teal bottle. But I knew better. This wasn’t breaking. This was melting. The dam I’d spent twenty years building—brick by polite brick, mortar made of "I'm fine" and "don't worry about it"—had cracked along a fault line I hadn't known existed.

It was a fact. Like gravity. Like rain. Like the river that would keep running long after I was gone, and the one that would keep running inside me until I wasn't. i feel myself torrent

I dried my face. I went to the kitchen. I made tea, and I let it steep too long, and I drank it bitter.

Not all at once. Not the merciful flood that sweeps you away clean. No, this was worse and better: a steady, stubborn torrent. Every suppressed shout, every bite of swallowed anger, every night I’d pressed my fists into my thighs to keep from screaming—they were all waking up. They wanted out. They wanted air. And now the water was coming

The words came out wrong. They always did. But for the first time, they felt true.

It started small: a forgotten grocery list that surfaced in my mind with the clarity of a scream. Then a laugh I’d buried six years ago, rising like a bubble from deep water—my mother’s laugh, the one she used before the treatments, before the slow quiet. I didn’t summon it. It just came. And then another. And another. Memories I’d locked in chests, weighted with stones, were now drifting up unannounced. But I knew better

By Tuesday, I couldn’t sit still. My leg bounced under my desk. My pen skated across paper without my permission, drawing the face of a boy I’d loved and lost to silence, not death. By Thursday, I was crying in the shower without sadness. Laughing in the grocery store without joy. Everything was leaking. Everything was flowing.